by Christopher F Rufo
A dispatch from Seattle Pride Month
For years, radical gender ideology appeared unstoppable. The media framed transgender identity as the next frontier of liberation. Pride Month drew enthusiastic endorsements from nearly every university, corporation, and school district. Dissenters were often marginalized, and the prevailing narrative allowed little room for debate.
No longer. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the movement has begun to retreat. The Supreme Court recently upheld a Tennessee law banning medical transition procedures for minors. Many corporations have withdrawn support for this year’s Pride events. An ideology that once seemed culturally dominant has lost significant ground in public opinion.
In retrospect, this reversal may have been inevitable. The gender movement sought to enshrine a rejection of biological reality in law. Its core claims—such as the idea that a man can become a woman—reflected the movement’s hubris and delusion.
Americans have the right to believe that human beings can change sex (though they cannot). But the gender cult pushed further, insisting that institutions adopt its tenets as official policy and punish dissent. What followed was a kind of petty tyranny—one that policed adult speech and imposed contested ideologies on children—exposing the hollowness of its favored slogans: “love” and “equality.”